Canterbury Bridge Club

FREE BRIDGE LESSONS - FREE FULL COURSE on how to play ACOL - dip in and out of - NO STRINGS ATTACHED

Canterbury bridge club in Kent is a great location where you can bump into similar like minded people who would like to get together and push a few playing cards around the table.

Canterbury bridge club are always looking for new members especially young new members. Bridge clubs need new life bringing into them, so young students coming out of college or university are model people to enlist at a bridge club. Bridge is a magnificent game that helps stimulate the brain, as a result the mechanics in the game can keep a conversation going for hours on just one hand alone!

Most bridge clubs now give instruction to new members - usually for a slight fee to pay a tutor who will teach similar minded newcomers how to play the greatest card game of them all. Canterbury bridge club like all clubs furthermore present different days / nights for diverse standards of play so some nights will be stronger than others.

The best part of bridge in the United Kingdom is Duplicate bridge where pairs compete beside one another - regularly there is a east/west winner and an north/south winner. Some clubs will do an arrow switch so that all the pairs can compete alongside one another.

Clubs will suggest various forms of bridge such as pairs or teams as well as different forms of the game within those categories such as Butler pairs or Swiss teams.

The English Bridge Union is accountable for bridge in the United Kingdom, for the most part clubs take money every night you play and pay a small sum to the EBU, this is known as Pay to Play.

For tougher games of bridge, clubs will hold open competitions on a periodic timescale where outside players will come in and play at weekends...small prizes are presented to the winners...but in general prize funds are kept quite low as in general people are playing more to test their competence against like minded people rather than trying to earn a living wage by playing bridge.

Players from Canterbury could also play in their Kent league and stand for their county if they get good enough. Full weekends can be taken up playing in tournaments up and down the land - it therefore becomes a splendid social game.

A further great part of playing bridge is you can sit at the same table as an England player for instance - you can play the best players in the country, which you cannot do on the whole in other competitive sports.

There are also substantial online communities such as the BBO where you can play for free and if you want to play all hours of the day - there is still no replacement though for live play.

Common Bridge Conventions

If you want to play at Canterbury Bridge Club then it's almost certainly a good idea to learn certain rudimentary convention systems accurately. A lot of people in the UK play ACOL with certain important bridge conventions thrown into the combination such as:

Stayman
Major suit Transfers over an opening 1NT
Blackwood

That is as uncomplicated as it gets! If you are wanting to play in a partnership for a long time as a lot of people fairly often end up doing you can change your system or/and flesh it out a lot more by adding extra gadgets to it such as:

The list is lengthy on conventions - it's in addition important for partnership of how you play the double and what calls are forcing or non-forcing.

At the conclusion of the day our advice is not to go to heavy on the magic as they are easy to forget if your card is chocked full of them - the most significant aspect is bidding, playing properly and enjoying yourself.

A Brief History of Bridge

The ancestry of bridge can be traced back to 1529 when it was referred to by Bishop Latimer in a published sermon. Playing cards became very popular and the mainstream game of Whist is still played. Contract bridge, which starts with an auction, was invented in 1925, during a cruise, by the American Harold S. Vanderbilt.

Bridge took off in a big way and was popularised by Culbertson and Goren, both American. The play of the cards was understood whilst Whist was the dominant game, but bidding methods had to be developed. In 1934 a group of strong London based players came up with a system that proved very successful. It rapidly spread to all parts of the UK and came to be known as Acol, the name of the road in which the originating bridge club was, and still is, located.

As is the way of things where lots of bright and dedicated people are involved, there have been lots of developments. By the turn of the century the Acol system had evolved, and there were many dialects, but all would still have been recognised by Acol's inventors. In contrast in the USA and most of the rest of the world had changed to systems that are usually described as Five Card Majors. Most of the bridge played on the web uses this type of bidding system.

Bidding

Bridge differs from whist in two important ways. Over and above one of the sets of cards being exposed, the vital difference is the way in which the game starts with a bidding phase. The end point is that one partnership outbids the opponents. Play then starts. The objective of the wining side is to make sufficient tricks to at least guarantee the contract they entered into. The opponents try to prevent them making their contract.

If you have never played bridge the bidding appears to be a classic auction. Each bid must be higher than all previous bids. However to an expert it is a sequence of coded messages. So learning to play bridge involves learning what amounts to a specialised language!

The Acol System

Acol, which is based on opening with 4 card majors, is the system of choice for most bridge players in the UK. Understanding the Acol system is vital to anyone playing bridge in the UK. Most of the people that you would like to be your partner will be Acol players, and even if you and your partner are playing a different system, you need to understand what the opposition are saying to each other!